June/July 2013

Cambridge

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Tuesday, April 24
7:00pm
David I. Kertzer presents The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe in conversation with JAMES CARROLL
Harvard Book Store welcomes Brown University professor DAVID I. KERTZER—the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Pope and Mussolini—for a discussion of his latest book The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe. He will be joined in conversation by novelist,…
Harvard Book Store welcomes Brown University professor DAVID I. KERTZER—the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Pope and Mussolini—for a discussion of his latest book The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe. He will be joined in conversation by novelist, journalist, and historian JAMES CARROLL.

About The Pope Who Would Be King

Days after his prime minister was assassinated in the middle of Rome in November 1848, Pope Pius IX found himself a virtual prisoner in his own palace. The wave of revolution that had swept through Europe now seemed poised to end the popes’ thousand-year reign over the Papal States, if not to the papacy itself. Disguising himself as a simple parish priest, Pius escaped through a back door. Climbing inside the Bavarian ambassador’s carriage, he embarked on a journey into a fateful exile.

Only two years earlier Pius’s election had triggered a wave of optimism across Italy. After the repressive reign of the dour Pope Gregory XVI, Italians saw the youthful, benevolent new pope as the man who would, at last, bring the Papal States into modern times and help create a new, unified Italian nation. But Pius was caught between a desire to please his subjects and a fear—stoked by the conservative cardinals—that heeding the people’s pleas would destroy the church. The resulting drama—with a colorful cast of characters, from Louis Napoleon and his rabble-rousing cousin Charles Bonaparte to Garibaldi, Tocqueville, and Metternich—was rife with treachery, tragedy, and international power politics.

David Kertzer is one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of Italy and the Vatican and has a rare ability to bring that history vividly to life. With a combination of gripping, cinematic storytelling and keen historical analysis, rooted in an unprecedented richness of archival sources, The Pope Who Would Be King sheds fascinating new light on the end of rule by divine right in the West and the emergence of modern Europe.
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Monday, April 30
7:30pm
The Harvard Square Book Circle discusses Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone
The Harvard Square Book Circle, our in-store book club, discusses JENNY ERPENBECK's Go, Went, Gone, which will be featured in the bookstore's Select Seventy display for the month of April. About Go, Went, Gone Go, Went, Gone is the masterful new novel by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck,…
The Harvard Square Book Circle, our in-store book club, discusses JENNY ERPENBECK's Go, Went, Gone, which will be featured in the bookstore's Select Seventy display for the month of April.

About Go, Went, Gone

Go, Went, Gone is the masterful new novel by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, “one of the most significant German-language novelists of her generation” (The Millions). The novel tells the tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz. Curiosity turns to compassion and an inner transformation, as he visits their shelter, interviews them, and becomes embroiled in their harrowing fates. Go, Went, Gone is a scathing indictment of Western policy toward the European refugee crisis, but also a touching portrait of a man who finds he has more in common with the Africans than he realizes. Exquisitely translated by Susan Bernofsky, Go, Went, Gone addresses one of the most pivotal issues of our time, facing it head-on in a voice that is both nostalgic and frightening.
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Tuesday, May 1
7:00pm
Issa Kohler-Hausmann presents Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing
Harvard Book Store welcomes Yale law and sociology professor ISSA KOHLER-HAUSMANN for a discussion of her debut book, Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing. About Misdemeanorland Felony conviction and mass incarceration attract considerable media …
Harvard Book Store welcomes Yale law and sociology professor ISSA KOHLER-HAUSMANN for a discussion of her debut book, Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing.

About Misdemeanorland

Felony conviction and mass incarceration attract considerable media attention these days, yet the most common criminal-justice encounters are for misdemeanors, not felonies, and the most common outcome is not prison. In the early 1990s, New York City launched an initiative under the banner of Broken Windows policing to dramatically expand enforcement against low-level offenses. Misdemeanorland is the first book to document the fates of the hundreds of thousands of people hauled into lower criminal courts as part of this policing experiment.

Drawing on three years of fieldwork inside and outside of the courtroom, in-depth interviews, and analysis of trends in arrests and dispositions of misdemeanors going back three decades, Issa Kohler-Hausmann argues that lower courts have largely abandoned the adjudicative model of criminal law administration in which questions of factual guilt and legal punishment drive case outcomes. Due to the sheer volume of arrests, lower courts have adopted a managerial model—and the implications are troubling. Kohler-Hausmann shows how significant volumes of people are marked, tested, and subjected to surveillance and control even though about half the cases result in some form of legal dismissal. She describes in harrowing detail how the reach of America's penal state extends well beyond the shocking numbers of people incarcerated in prisons or stigmatized by a felony conviction.

Revealing and innovative, Misdemeanorland shows how the lower reaches of our criminal justice system operate as a form of social control and surveillance, often without adjudicating cases or imposing formal punishment.
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Thursday, May 3
7:00pm
Rachel Kushner presents The Mars Room: A Novel
Harvard Book Store welcomes National Book Award finalist RACHEL KUSHNER—author of Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba—for a discussion of her latest novel, The Mars Room. About The Mars Room From acclaimed author Rachel Kushner, whose Flamethrowers was called “the best, most brazen, most interesting…
Harvard Book Store welcomes National Book Award finalist RACHEL KUSHNER—author of Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba—for a discussion of her latest novel, The Mars Room.

About The Mars Room

From acclaimed author Rachel Kushner, whose Flamethrowers was called “the best, most brazen, most interesting book of the year” (Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine), comes a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America.

It’s 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision.

Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room demonstrates new levels of mastery and depth in Kushner’s work. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined. As James Wood said in The New Yorker, her fiction “succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive.”
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Harvard Book Store
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1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
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Monday, May 7
7:00pm
Jesmyn Ward presents Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel
Harvard Book Store welcomes two-time National Book Award–winning writer JESMYN WARD—author of Salvage the Bones and The Fire This Time—for a discussion of the paperback release of Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel. About Sing, Unburied, Sing Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it …
Harvard Book Store welcomes two-time National Book Award–winning writer JESMYN WARD—author of Salvage the Bones and The Fire This Time—for a discussion of the paperback release of Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel.

About Sing, Unburied, Sing

Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesn’t lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who won’t acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager.

His mother, Leonie, is an inconsistent presence in his and his toddler sister’s lives. She is an imperfect mother in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is Black and her children’s father is White. She wants to be a better mother but can’t put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. Simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high, Leonie is embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances.

When the children’s father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another thirteen-year-old boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love.

Rich with Ward’s distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic and unforgettable family story and an odyssey through rural Mississippi’s past and present.
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Harvard Book Store
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1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
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Tuesday, May 8
7:00pm
Dambisa Moyo presents Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth—And How to Fix It
Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities welcome award-winning international economist DAMBISA MOYO—author of Winner Take All and Dead Aid—for a discussion of her latest book, Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth and How to Fix It. About Edge of Chaos Around the world, …
Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities welcome award-winning international economist DAMBISA MOYO—author of Winner Take All and Dead Aid—for a discussion of her latest book, Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth and How to Fix It.

About Edge of Chaos

Around the world, people who are angry at stagnant wages and growing inequality have rebelled against established governments and turned to political extremes. Liberal democracy, history's greatest engine of growth, now struggles to overcome unprecedented economic headwinds—from aging populations to scarce resources to unsustainable debt burdens. Hobbled by short-term thinking and ideological dogma, democracies risk falling prey to nationalism and protectionism that will deliver declining living standards.

In Edge of Chaos, Dambisa Moyo shows why economic growth is essential to global stability, and why liberal democracies are failing to produce it today. Rather than turning away from democracy, she argues, we must fundamentally reform it. Edge of Chaos presents a radical blueprint for change in order to galvanize growth and ensure the survival of democracy in the twenty-first century.
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Harvard Book Store
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1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
617-661-1515
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Thursday, May 10
6:30pm
Simon Winchester presents The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
Harvard Book Store welcomes acclaimed author and journalist SIMON WINCHESTER for a discussion of his latest book, The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World. Please Note Seating is limited and will be available on a first come, first served basis. Seating and elevator access…
Harvard Book Store welcomes acclaimed author and journalist SIMON WINCHESTER for a discussion of his latest book, The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World.

Please Note

Seating is limited and will be available on a first come, first served basis. Seating and elevator access to the Lecture Hall (located on level L2) will begin at 6pm. A 70-car underground parking garage with access from Broadway is available when the library is open.

About The Perfectionists

The revered New York Times bestselling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement—precision—in a superb history that is both an homage and a warning for our future.

The rise of manufacturing could not have happened without an attention to precision. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England, standards of measurement were established, giving way to the development of machine tools—machines that make machines. Eventually, the application of precision tools and methods resulted in the creation and mass production of items from guns and glass to mirrors, lenses, and cameras—and eventually gave way to further breakthroughs, including gene splicing, microchips, and the Hadron Collider.

Simon Winchester takes us back to origins of the Industrial Age, to England where he introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production: John Wilkinson, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden, and Joseph Whitworth. It was Thomas Jefferson who later exported their discoveries to the fledgling United States, setting the nation on its course to become a manufacturing titan. Winchester moves forward through time, to today’s cutting-edge developments occurring around the world, from America to Western Europe to Asia.

As he introduces the minds and methods that have changed the modern world, Winchester explores fundamental questions. Why is precision important? What are the different tools we use to measure it? Who has invented and perfected it? Has the pursuit of the ultra-precise in so many facets of human life blinded us to other things of equal value, such as an appreciation for the age-old traditions of craftsmanship, art, and high culture? Are we missing something that reflects the world as it is, rather than the world as we think we would wish it to be? And can the precise and the natural co-exist in society?
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Harvard Book Store
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Friday, May 11
7:00pm
Eileen McNamara presents Eunice: The Kennedy Who Changed the World
Harvard Book Store welcomes Brandeis professor and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist EILEEN MCNAMARA for a discussion of her latest book, Eunice: The Kennedy Who Changed the World. About Eunice While Joe Kennedy was grooming his sons for the White House and the Senate, his Stanford-educated daughter…
Harvard Book Store welcomes Brandeis professor and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist EILEEN MCNAMARA for a discussion of her latest book, Eunice: The Kennedy Who Changed the World.

About Eunice

While Joe Kennedy was grooming his sons for the White House and the Senate, his Stanford-educated daughter Eunice was tapping her father’s fortune and her brothers’ political power to engineer one of the great civil rights movements of our time on behalf of millions of children and adults with intellectual disabilities. Now, in Eunice, Pulitzer Prize winner Eileen McNamara finally brings Eunice Kennedy Shriver out from her brothers’ shadow to show an officious, cigar-smoking, indefatigable woman of unladylike determination and deep compassion born of rage: at the medical establishment that had no answers for her sister Rosemary; at the revered but dismissive father whose vision for his family did not extend beyond his sons; and at the government that failed to deliver on America’s promise of equality.

Granted access to never-before-seen private papers—from the scrapbooks Eunice kept as a schoolgirl in prewar London to her thoughts on motherhood and feminism—McNamara paints a vivid portrait of a woman both ahead of her time and out of step with it: the visionary founder of the Special Olympics, a devout Catholic in a secular age, and a formidable woman whose impact on American society was longer lasting than that of any of the Kennedy men.
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Harvard Book Store
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1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
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Monday, May 14
7:00pm
Hanna Holborn Gray presents An Academic Life: A Memoir in conversation with JANE KAMENSKY
Harvard Book Store welcomes HANNA HOLBORN GRAY—the first woman president of a major American University—for a discussion of her debut memoir, An Academic Life. She will be joined in conversation by historian, author, and Harvard professor JANE KAMENSKY. About An Academic Life Hanna Holborn Gray has…
Harvard Book Store welcomes HANNA HOLBORN GRAY—the first woman president of a major American University—for a discussion of her debut memoir, An Academic Life. She will be joined in conversation by historian, author, and Harvard professor JANE KAMENSKY.

About An Academic Life

Hanna Holborn Gray has lived her entire life in the world of higher education. The daughter of academics, she fled Hitler's Germany with her parents in the 1930s, emigrating to New Haven, where her father was a professor at Yale University. She has studied and taught at some of the world's most prestigious universities. She was the first woman to serve as provost of Yale. In 1978, she became the first woman president of a major research university when she was appointed to lead the University of Chicago, a position she held for fifteen years. In 1991, Gray was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in recognition of her extraordinary contributions to education.

An Academic Life is a candid self-portrait by one of academia's most respected trailblazers. Gray describes what it was like to grow up as a child of refugee parents, and reflects on the changing status of women in the academic world. She discusses the migration of intellectuals from Nazi-held Europe and the transformative role these exiles played in American higher education—and how the émigré experience in America transformed their own lives and work. She sheds light on the character of university communities, how they are structured and administered, and the balance they seek between tradition and innovation, teaching and research, and undergraduate and professional learning.

An Academic Life speaks to the fundamental issues of purpose, academic freedom, and governance that arise time and again in higher education, and that pose sharp challenges to the independence and scholarly integrity of each new generation.
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Wednesday, May 16
7:00pm
Michael Pollan presents How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence in conversation with RON SUSKIND Tickets on sale now (book included) This event inclu
Harvard Book Store welcomes renowned writer MICHAEL POLLAN—author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food—for a discussion of his latest book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. He …
Harvard Book Store welcomes renowned writer MICHAEL POLLAN—author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food—for a discussion of his latest book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. He will be joined in conversation by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist RON SUSKIND.

About How to Change Your Mind

When Michael Pollan set out to research how LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) are being used to provide relief to people suffering from difficult-to-treat conditions such as depression, addiction, and anxiety, he did not intend to write what is undoubtedly his most personal book. But upon discovering how these remarkable substances are improving the lives not only of the mentally ill but also of healthy people coming to grips with the challenges of everyday life, he decided to explore the landscape of the mind in the first person as well as the third. Thus began a singular adventure into the experience of various altered states of consciousness, along with a dive deep into both the latest brain science and the thriving underground community of psychedelic therapists. Pollan sifts the historical record to separate the truth about these mysterious drugs from the myths that have surrounded them since the 1960s when a handful of psychedelic evangelists catalyzed a powerful backlash against what was then a promising field of research.

A unique and elegant blend of science, memoir, travel writing, history, and medicine, How to Change Your Mind is a triumph of participatory journalism. By turns dazzling and edifying, it is the gripping account of a journey to an exciting and unexpected new frontier in our understanding of the mind, the self, and our place in the world. The true subject of Pollan's "mental travelogue" is not just psychedelic drugs but also the eternal puzzle of human consciousness and how, in a world that offers us both struggle and beauty, we can do our best to be fully present and find meaning in our lives.
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Harvard Book Store
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1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
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Thursday, May 17
7:00pm
Jim Holt presents When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought
Harvard Book Store welcomes JIM HOLT—bestselling author of Why Does the World Exist?—for a discussion of his latest book, When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought. About When Einstein Walked with Gödel Does time exist? What is infinity? Why do mirrors reverse left and right…
Harvard Book Store welcomes JIM HOLT—bestselling author of Why Does the World Exist?—for a discussion of his latest book, When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought.

About When Einstein Walked with Gödel

Does time exist? What is infinity? Why do mirrors reverse left and right but not up and down? In this scintillating collection, Holt explores the human mind, the cosmos, and the thinkers who’ve tried to encompass the latter with the former. With his trademark clarity and humor, Holt probes the mysteries of quantum mechanics, the quest for the foundations of mathematics, and the nature of logic and truth. Along the way, he offers intimate biographical sketches of celebrated and neglected thinkers, from the physicist Emmy Noether to the computing pioneer Alan Turing and the discoverer of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot. Holt offers a painless and playful introduction to many of our most beautiful but least understood ideas, from Einsteinian relativity to string theory, and also invites us to consider why the greatest logician of the twentieth century believed the U.S. Constitution contained a terrible contradiction―and whether the universe truly has a future.
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Harvard Book Store
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1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
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Friday, May 18
7:00pm
Serhii Plokhy presents Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe
Harvard Book Store welcomes Eastern Europe historian and Harvard professor SERHII PLOKHY for a discussion of his latest book, Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe. About Chernobyl On the morning of April 26, 1986, Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of …
Harvard Book Store welcomes Eastern Europe historian and Harvard professor SERHII PLOKHY for a discussion of his latest book, Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe.

About Chernobyl

On the morning of April 26, 1986, Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine. Dozens died of radiation poisoning, fallout contaminated half the continent, and thousands fell ill.

In Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy draws on new sources to tell the dramatic stories of the firefighters, scientists, and soldiers who heroically extinguished the nuclear inferno. He lays bare the flaws of the Soviet nuclear industry, tracing the disaster to the authoritarian character of Communist party rule, the regime's control of scientific information, and its emphasis on economic development over all else.

Today, the risk of another Chernobyl looms in the mismanagement of nuclear power in the developing world. A moving and definitive account, Chernobyl is also an urgent call to action.
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Harvard Book Store
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1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
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Monday, May 21
7:00pm
Lisa Hayden and Luke Leafgren present their respective translations of The Aviator by Eugene Vodolazkin and The Baghdad Clock by Shahad Al Rawi
Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities welcome acclaimed translators LISA HAYDEN and LUKE LEAFGREN for a discussion of their latest works of translation, The Aviator by Eugene Vodolazkin and The Baghdad Clock by Shahad Al Rawi.
Harvard Book Store
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1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
617-661-1515
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Tuesday, May 29
7:00pm
The Harvard Square Book Circle discusses Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time
The Harvard Square Book Circle, our in-store book club, discusses STEPHEN HAWKING's A Brief History of Time, which will be featured in the bookstore's Select Seventy display for the month of May.
Harvard Book Store
more at harvard book store
1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
617-661-1515
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Cambridge

Tuesday, April 24

7:00pm

Wednesday, April 25

6:00pm

Wednesday, April 25

7:00pm

Thursday, April 26

7:00pm

Thursday, April 26

7:30pm

Friday, April 27

3:00pm

Friday, April 27

7:00pm

Monday, April 30

7:30pm

Tuesday, May 1

7:00pm

Thursday, May 3

7:00pm

Friday, May 4

3:00pm

Friday, May 4

7:00pm

Monday, May 7

7:00pm

Tuesday, May 8

7:00pm

Wednesday, May 9

6:00pm